Colorado considers a mining ban

In the wake of Summitville, Colorado could
follow Montana's lead and outlaw cyanide mining

LA JARA, Colo. - When Dr. Colin Henderson looks
up at southern Colorado's San Juan Mountains, the family physician
sees a septic, 500-acre wound in the alpine landscape of South
Mountain.

In spite of seven years and more than
$150 million of government-financed reclamation, the Summitville
Mine, at 11,500 feet, still seeps toxins into the Alamosa River
watershed, a tributary of the Rio Grande (HCN, 1/19/98:
Summitville: an expensive lesson). Farmers and ranchers, who depend
on the tiny river to water thousands of cattle and sheep and
irrigate 45,000 acres of croplands, routinely replace corroded
headgates and worry about unknown, long-term effects from the
pollution.

Officials admit that there's no end in
sight to the acid mine drainage from the Superfund site, which is
why Henderson and other Colorado residents have formed the
nonprofit Alliance for Responsible Mining.

The
grassroots alliance wants to ban cyanide in any new open-pit gold
mines in Colorado, and to stop the expansion of the only currently
operating gold mine in the state, the Cripple Creek & Victor
Gold Mining Co. It needs 62,438 petition signatures before Aug. 7
to place an initiative on the ballot. If voters pass the initiative
in November, the state Constitution will be amended and Colorado
will join Montana as the second state to ban the
practice.

"We have already suffered greatly from
this type of mining, and it's time to make a conscious choice to
protect our water and protect ourselves from the huge taxpayer
liability these mines cause," says Henderson. "As a doctor, I know
cyanide is deadly. Prevention ahead of time is the only cure."

A river of vinegar

The
Summitville Mine operated as an open-pit, heap-leach gold mine from
1986 until 1992, when the Summitville Consolidated Mining Corp.,
Inc., declared bankruptcy and abandoned the mine to the state and
federal governments.

The Canadian-based company
had blasted away a third of the mountain, exposing hundreds of
acres of once tundra-covered rock. Millions of tons of rock were
crushed to gravel, "heaped" 200 feet high on a 40-acre synthetic
liner, and soaked with cyanide to "leach" microscopic gold
particles and other minerals into a
drain.

Summitville attracted worldwide attention
in 1990, when all aquatic life for 17 miles in the Alamosa River
died. Officials won't blame the fish kill on cyanide, but everyone
agrees that polluted water spilled into the river. Since then,
heavy metals, including copper, zinc and iron, continue to flood
the watershed each spring when snow at the alpine site melts and
overwhelms the site's water-treatment plant.

At
times, the river is as acidic as vinegar. Yet it now shows small
signs of aquatic life. State and EPA officials say problems still
exist at Summitville, but the reclamation is showing results, says
Austin Buckingham, one of the state health department's site
managers.

The Terrace Reservoir on the Alamosa
River holds 13,000 acre-feet of water that is so full of heavy
metals it shimmers turquoise. But concentrations have dramatically
decreased, says Buckingham.

"It's true the
Alamosa River and Terrace Reservoir have been devastated," she told
the audience at a recent public meeting in La Jara, "but
reclamation has improved the (water's) pH and I stand by my ...
studies that showed a negligible impact to your crops."

There's still a long way to go. Although the
heap-leach pad is capped and "99 percent neutralized," Buckingham
says, it still contains about a ton and a half of cyanide suspended
in 93 million gallons of water.

"That scares the
hell out of me," said Ignacio Rodriguez, a member of the Alliance
for Responsible Mining. "That could be released downstream at any
time. The integrity of the liner is dubious. We'll see leakage -
not if, but when."

"They got the gold and we got
the shaft," says Rodriguez, a retiree who lives along the river and
yearns for the day he can once again catch fish with his
grandchildren.

Slow but
sure

Since the taxpayer-funded clean-up began in 1993,
millions of tons of rock have been trucked back up the mountain and
dumped into the giant open pit, sealing it off (HCN, 1/25/93:
Colorado mining industry strikes again). Drain tunnels dug by
turn-of-the-century miners have been plugged, reducing another
source of pollution. The plugs, however, backed up millions of
gallons of acidic water inside the mountain, and the pressure is
now causing seeps to appear around the area.

This
summer, Delhur Industries, the clean-up contractor, will quarry
200,000 tons of limestone near Walsenburg, Colo., truck it to the
site and use it to line miles of drainage ditches to buffer acid
released from groundwater runoff. They will also spread crushed
limestone from a quarry near Salida on hundreds of acres of exposed
rock to neutralize acids released when the rock gets wet. Many tons
of compost will also be trucked in for grass and sedge
seeding.

Angus Campbell, reclamation coordinator
for the state health department, said last month that the last
phase of the reclamation is about a third completed. Eighty acres
were seeded last year, he said, and Delhur workers, who returned to
the snow-covered site on April 17, will seed another 140 acres this
summer.

"We've seen some major improvements in
the last seven years," says the state health department's
Buckingham. "It can be relatively easy to contaminate the
environment and unfortunately it can take a very long time to
remediate and restore the environment. Our goal is to restore fish
and the aquatic habitat to the Alamosa River."

More to come?

As state and
federal officials struggle to clean up the Summitville mess, the
Colorado Mining Association is defending its ability to open and
expand cyanide heap-leach mines in the state. The association and
the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Co. vigorously oppose
the Alliance for Responsible Mining's initiative drive and have
already slowed it down in court.

After state
officials approved the wording of the initiative in March, the
mining association and two mining company employees appealed it to
the state Supreme Court, which required some minor changes to the
initiative in early May.

Stuart Sanderson, mining
association president, says the way the initiative is written is
unclear, misleading and unnecessary. Stricter regulations, approved
since the Summitville spill, ensure "there won't be a repeat of
Summitville," he says.

"They (say they) want to
ban the use of cyanide, but what they are really after is banning
surface mining for gold and silver," says Sanderson. "They want to
alarm the voters."

The association argued that
the word "cyanide" in the initiative title will lead voters to
associate the mining practice with poisoning and capital
punishment, but the court rejected industry claims that the word
was misleading.

The Cripple Creek mine is moving
ahead with its expansion plans, and it's likely that its proposal
will be approved before the November election. But the initiative
is still making the industry nervous.

"This is an
attempt to prohibit the operations of a lawfully permitted,
state-of-the-art mine and shut it down, putting hundreds of people
out of work," says Sanderson. "It is a dangerous constitutional
precedent. Whose business will be next?"

Mark H. Hunter is a freelance
journalist in Monte Vista,
Colo.

YOU CAN CONTACT
...

The Alliance
For Responsible Mining, 719/274-0322 or
www.responsiblemining.org;

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All these coments by so called professionals are not true. Summitville did not kill the weightman fork of the alamosa river. The river never had fish below the confluence of a natural running spring from the South Mountain volcano, and Weightman Forks head waters, north west of the mine. Above the confluence on Weightman creek fish abound. These lies were politicly inspired by the Clinton White house. And we still hear them spouted.Stop the Waste at Summitvile. (I worked there 18 yr, saw it all)